Creeps of the World, Unite!

“To Console The Hopeless Self”: Castle by J. Robert Lennon

“‘Out!’ I said.  I suppose I was shouting.  My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face.  But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear.  Fear of my reaction, perhaps.  But when a person has lived a life like hers, a life of promiscuity, rootlessness, and substance abuse, resentment and fear tend to replace all reasonable and proper emotions, and the world becomes your enemy.” -Eric Loesch

An ex-soldier with a mysterious past.  A venture into the eerily silent forest flanking a house recently purchased outside “Gettysburg, New York, population 2,310 and falling.” An albino deer that leads the protagonist to a strange castle hidden among “tightly packed maples, birches, ashes, and pines.” A confrontation with the forgotten.

If these sound at all like tropes of a conventional thriller, it is because they are.  But in the fiction of J. Robert Lennon, whatever sort of genre costume the narrative might wear, there is always something more to be peeked at beneath the outer layers, sly hints of contradiction to the façade.  Lennon’s novels fulfill the role of cool older brother spotted in the banquet-hall of a formal affair, winking, ‘Hey, kid, it’s me.’ The Harrison Ford of literary fiction, if you will: reckless, ungainly, charming.

Castle, Lennon’s latest novel, is not so big on formality even if the aforementioned protagonist, Eric Loesch, practices its art where ever he goes, a self-protective mechanism: there are things that he would rather forget.

With a blend of solipsism, presumption, and unease, Eric rebuffs the everyday friendliness of the few people with whom he must interact in purchasing the plot of land and procuring the necessary supplies for his home renovation project. “Yalp,” a local electrician named Heph opines with respect to Eric’s labors, “it’s real nice to see a house come back from the dead, as it were.”  Thinks Eric: “His backwoods charm and colloquial speech did little to dispel my sense that he was observing and testing me, gauging my reactions to his supposedly innocent comments and questions.”

When a real estate agent named Jennifer thanks him for making her day with a big sale, Eric explains that he would “prefer to keep things between us on a professional level.” His implication is not well-met.

And yet, it isn’t that he doesn’t mean well.  A children’s book, discovered in the moldy basement of his new home, speaks to him: “The book offered a character with whom I was able to identify, and a portrayal of bravery and self-reliance that corresponded very closely to my own values.  I wished only I could send the book back in time, to my younger self, in his moments of greatest need.”  For Eric, his “younger self” continues to exist, marooned in time—surely a sympathetic trait.  He simply happens to be a guy grown accustomed to a hostile world.  The reasons for that lurk in the shadowy recesses of the house he has purchased and the castle deep in the silent woods and the unacknowledged confines of his own painful history.

Researching the identity of the house’s former owner, Eric converses with a professor at the local college, who is compelled to respond to his challenge in the following manner:

“All I meant,” she said slowly, “was that, in the wake of the sixties, and of our military adventures abroad, most intelligent people have absorbed the idea that none of us is ever very far from emotional collapse.” When I offered no reply, she went on.  “Our personalities are complex, but the animal instincts they conceal are stronger, and not very far below the surface.” She met my stare and said, “Don’t you agree, Mr. Loesch?”

Castle is a novel about shame, the inchoate and unnamed rearing up its ugly face, the best built defenses helpless to prevent it.  Eric has a passion for restoring the run-down and surveying the uncharted; other people, no matter what emotions might blip across the sonar of his self-perception, signal a threat: fear or disgust.  And yet… he knows… he knows… there is… someone… else… out there.  While harboring resentment, even rage, for his long estranged sister’s perceived lifestyle, Eric, an intelligent man, has managed to make a relative nullity of his life, lacking for nourishing social ties (akin to Marilynne Robinson’s Jack Boughton) and taking refuge in the creaking home whose former owner may well have been his one-time mentor.

“Did the family ever imagine, as they sat together around the table, that this room might someday be empty of everything but cobwebs and dust?”: In short, Eric is a creep, convinced, perhaps rightly, of a greater creepiness’s existence, itself a creepy thing to dwell on.  Lennon employs the means of thriller convention (“He was here—I knew it.  The moment had come”/ “At last, I faced my nemesis.”/ “I was, at last, inside the castle.”), the ends of which are sales and movie adaptations, to turn the story around, as it were, and cast a hard look at the face peering in.  Which is, of course, only the face that Lennon imagines.  Though, as anyone who has read Mailman knows, his imagination in regard to male creepiness is more than fertile.

“Surprises Are Good But Not When They Are Eternal”: The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter

“‘If you had disappeared, if you had died, we would have… we would have become you.  We would have taken you on.  We would have turned into you.’ He waits. ‘You would have lived in us.’” –Jerome Coolberg to Nathaniel Mason

“Everyone needs to be saved, right now, instantly saved from history itself, the factuality of it.”: For all the submerged horrors he has faced, one thing Eric Loesch can count himself fortunate never to have experienced is a roomful of partying grad students.  Now it is there that the unnerving truly underlies everything said and done, the amassed ambition, swirling anxiety, identities in seemingly permanent flux.  What type of grad students, you ask?  Well, their physical location is Buffalo, NY, but, more than that, Charles Baxter’s latest novel The Soul Thief does not state.  Something to do with art, suffice it to say; perhaps, music, or literature, or philosophy.  The exact subject of their studies rests beside the fact of their immersion in each other’s example, the figure each cuts.

Or figures, rather.  At least, when it comes to Jerome Coolberg, whose name, the narrator Nathaniel Mason acknowledges, “sounds fictional and implausible, a poor effort at whimsy.” While the shambolic factor is subtextual in Lennon’s Castle, here it occupies a position in the novel’s foreground, enacted through the shenanigans of Mr. Coolberg and ultimately driven by him to such lengths as to resemble nothing so much as art.

Says a partygoer of “whiz-kid sage” Coolberg at the grad school gathering where Nathaniel makes his acquaintance: “He’s the first person I’ve known who can be in two places at once.  He’s dislocated.  Not a joint or a knee—the whole person.” When Nathaniel and his impromptu date Theresa find Coolberg holding court in one corner of the old house, Nathaniel observes how his voice has “a pleading note, halfway between seduction and distress, and an intelligent gentleness that is all the more alarming for its measured calm, its burnt-over benumbed despair.” As well, Coolberg insists that he be called either “Jerome” or “Coolberg.” Never “Jerry.”

Another important question, though: who is Nathaniel?  An earnest observer, a good looking guy, a transplant from the Midwest (his father: “a patiently good man who seemed to relish his nonentity status, his lack of individuality”), Nathaniel also takes great satisfaction in volunteering at The People’s Kitchen, a local pantry founded to lend aid to those who cannot afford a warm meal.  When he returns to his apartment one night to find a burglar rooting through his shirt-closet, he decides to have a chat with the man, bidding him when he makes his belated exit: “Drop by again.  Just knock next time.” Every so often Nathaniel receives a phone call from his mute sister, Catherine, to whom he feels obligated to recount the events of his day, believing that “the stories keep her alive.”

Generous and well-intentioned, perhaps to a fault, Nathaniel’s heart is divided between two women: Theresa, whom he meets in a rain-dappled park en route to that initial party—she is a Midwestern transplant much like himself, if also, like Coolberg, a student of the striking image—and Jamie Esterson, a sweet, mothering sculptor, who lives a solitary existence full of fleeting, all-consuming passions.  It also happens that she identifies as a lesbian.  No matter: a recovering Catholic, Jamie finds herself drawn to Nathaniel’s virtues, in the original sense of the term.  “You make me nervous,” she tells him.  “You’re too available.  You need to be more vigilant.  Close yourself down a little.  Men shouldn’t be like you.”

One of these entanglements quickly becomes more serious than the other, while, not to be forgotten, along totters Coolberg, trailing Nathaniel’s literal and figurative footsteps.  There is this novel he is working on, you see: “The strain of loving two women is one that few men can withstand,” the aspiring great professes to Nathaniel, “Even Ezra Pound lost his mind by loving two women.  This young man, this character named Ambrose, develops an antipathy to daylight because in his doubleness, his double-heartedness, he fears that he will meet himself on the sidewalk coming toward himself from the opposite direction.”

Steadily, the moment is forced toward its crisis.

When the smoke clears, decades have passed, Nathaniel having returned to the Midwest, a suburban home, two boys, a loving and “frighteningly guileless” wife.  Regularly at night, a show called “American Evenings” plays on the radio, one whose host happens to be that old classmate of Nathaniel’s, Jerome Coolberg.  It is a show Nathaniel has paid attention to from time to time, in spite of himself, marveling at Coolberg’s technique of making himself at once invisible and omnipresent.  All these years later, Nathaniel’s feelings for Jamie abide in his heart, memory of their relationship’s dissolution still fresh:

“This is desperation you’re witnessing,” he says, gripping her.  All at once, the thought occurs to him that what he’s expressing is not love but hysteria, rising out of his own emptiness.  He is in the grip of inflated speech, exaggeration, all the insincere locutions of opacity and self-deception.  He is becoming, he feels with sudden queasy recognition, like a character in a plot dreamed up by someone like Coolberg.

Nathaniel’s chance to address the unresolved arrives one evening in the form of a call from that very Coolberg, inviting his old acquaintance out to L.A., for a talk like those on the show he hosts.  But this one will transpire without the studio set.  Nathaniel accepts the invitation, once again, in spite of himself.  He meets with Coolberg at Chateau Marmont, or a scene very like it, and together, the two venture out toward Santa Monica.  Nathaniel waxes poetic: “Night dropped its black lace around us.” Time plays onward through drinks and rehashing of the past until Nathaniel finds himself in Coolberg’s apartment, its mystery at last revealed to him:

The rooms looked like the temporary unsupervised housing of someone with a ravening spiritual hunger, a grandiloquent vacancy that would consume anything to fill up the interior space where a soul should be.  Books were piled and stacked everywhere.  Behind this craving resided an urge as strong as love.

Baxter—yes, Baxter: where has he gone in this account?—has written a novel that ought to last for as much time as there is between here and forever.  The Soul Thief is the coolest book to have read, and never admit to having read.  Perhaps the creepiest two sentences of all fall in the novel’s final section, oddly resonating, as they do, with Lennon’s Castle: “Nathaniel Mason enters the silent house.  I can easily imagine it.”

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.

Designing Narratives for the iPhone: TREEHOUSE

TREEHOUSE – App Trailer from Jason Franzen on Vimeo.

Here at Electric Literature, we’re often thinking about storytelling on new devices. Recently we discovered TREEHOUSE, a nicely designed narrative collaboration developed specifically for the iPhone. We asked editor Joe Wachs and designer Jason Franzen to write a bit about the intention, process and challenges of designing for an emerging literary form.

What is Treehouse?

JOE WACHS: TREEHOUSE is a true story, fictionalized to protect the guilty, which took place over the course of the year 1996 via back-and-forth emails between two people.  The collection of e-mails were discovered by accident, then edited for clarity, rhythm, and flow by our publishing company, FIRST F15TEEN.  The project, therefore, took over 15 years to gestate.  My publishing partner, Jason Franzen, conceived of an elegant format for navigating these e-mails based on our own email dialogues.  Jason and I have not met face-to-face in over six years, which added to the excitement of bringing this project to life.

In 2004, I completed a Masters Degree from NYU’s Gallatin Division.  This was a self-designed program allowing me to study both theatre and technology, which led me to digital storytelling.  My thesis, New Storytelling Machines (http://hybridpoetics.com/hybrid/tapra.html) became the foundation upon which I built TREEHOUSE.

“Stories are pushing past linear formats not out of mere playfulness, but in an effort to give expression to the characteristically twentieth-century perception of life composed of parallel possibilities…to capture such a constantly bifurcating plot-line, however, one would need more than a thick labyrinthine novel or a sequence of films.  To truly capture such cascading permutation, one would need a computer.” Hamlet on the Holodeck - The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray.

I remember reading hundreds of books on the subject of digital narratives, new story formats, virtual reality, digital aesthetics, telematics, multilinear storytelling, hypermedia: Ergodic Literature; Narrative as Virtual Reality; Computers as Theatre; Digital Aesthetics; the list goes on and on…’til the dot com dawn…

Fortunately for me, Jason Franzen could give a rat’s ass about any of this theoretical hoola-balu.  His aim was to communicate the story and the message of TREEHOUSE in the simplest form possible.

How did communication inform the design choices you made?

JASON FRANZEN: Communication has multiple parallel tracks running side-by-side in the TREEHOUSE project.  First, we have the source material tête-à-tête as the foundation running throughout.  In this couple’s private communications, the thing I found most interesting was the closed nature of it all — being a “back-and-forth” between two romantics separated by great distance, yet able to digitally whisper in each other’s ear with certainty of privacy and directness; that element of the communication formula led me to design an experience where the tightly closed loop was emphasized in a clear two-color palette.  By doing so, his & her notes would read like passionate Morse-code.

Were there specific influences when the idea formed?

JW:  Sure.  There’s a clear synthesis between Griffin & Sabine and The Notebook, but more importantly, the early hypertext novel Afternoon, A Story by Michael Joyce helped to bring these ideas to the forefront.  When we agreed upon the idea to bring these e-mails to the public, we explored the iPhone as a possibility and in doing so discovered Shadows Never Sleep, which is a perfect seed to have been planted in the mobile space.  What makes Shadows so appropriate is its form; a narrative is conveyed, yet with features of the iPhone, not the turning of pages.  This will be the future of storytelling, in my opinion, when authors stop confining their imaginations to the limiting manifestations of the book, just as artists in the historic avant-garde stopped confining their artwork to the boundaries of the canvass.  Why must there be fake pages?  It makes no sense.

What other aspects of communication do you feel are essential to the project?

JASON FRANZEN: The framework of e-mail messages themselves.  E-mails from 15-years-ago follow the same basic principles as they do today: they have a From, To, Date and Time Stamp, a Subject Line and the Body of the message.  With this couple’s relationship and the contents of their messages, each byte of data plays a part in the story.  I felt this should be elevated to supporting actors in the drama.  In this context, the seemingly innocuous time-stamp, and more specifically the gaps between the time-stamps, create a tension and set a rhythm that anyone who has ever pressed SEND and waited for a reply can attest to.  For this, I designed a visual time-line not normally seen in e-mail to highlight these bursts of emotional thrust/parries and the inevitable retreats each lover makes — whether from exhaustion or practicality.

Lastly, an important part of the project is an invisible layer of communication (as far as the reader is concerned): the dynamic communication between the Editor and Design that surrounded the creation of TREEHOUSE.  As the Designer, my goal was to package and present the content presented by the Editor in a way that made the unfolding story feel natural and authentic.  At the same time, I hoped to bring a level of art to the proceedings that might frame the fact that this esoteric project was truly a new dynamic for publishing and storytelling — a unique combination of human emotions, technology, reality and staging.  Knowing Joe’s background with theatre, I challenged myself to design a “set” that would be worthy of the effort he invested in unearthing and shining this gem of a story.  And, all of this sense of artistic aspiration and inspiration came to me through his own e-mails — arriving at all hours, in all shapes and sizes — all varieties of direction.  I found that despite its limitations, these well-crafted digital notes with witty subject lines threaded together across time could paint a picture of passion as clear as any performance I have witnessed.

More of First Fifteen’s work can be seen at http://www.FirstFifteen.com.

The Escape: Songs of Terror

The Escape opens with Raphael Haffner, 78, English, Jewish, lover of cricket, jazz and women, hiding in a hotel wardrobe to observe a young woman named Zinka have sex with her boyfriend. To observe her boyfriend Niko suck at her nipples. Haffner is a retired banker visiting this Alpine resort town to reclaim his dead ex-wife’s villa but finds himself, as he always seems to find himself, at the center of a sexual farce. See, Zinka knows he’s in the cupboard—she has a thing for Haffner. And Frau Tummel, a middle-aged married German woman, has also fallen for Haffner’s good looks—the septuagenarian still has them.

English writer Adam Thirlwell likes to write about sex. His first novel, Politics, centered on the making and unmaking of a threesome and an excerpt from it landed him on Granta‘s Best Young British Novelists list in 2003. He’s also bright as can be and incredibly well-read—The Delighted States, his second book, was a luxurious, alternate history of the novel and ended with Thirlwell’s own translation of Nabokov’s “Mademoiselle O.” It was a slow, strange thrill to read, like checking in a hotel somewhere you’ve never been and finding the staff is made up of your favorite dead writers. They know each other? They work together! They carry the bags to your room.

The Escape has the marks of both books. Its postscript lists 49 writers whose works Thirlwell either quoted directly or adapted, including Kafka, Flaubert, Perec, Hitchcock, Tolstoy and Tupac. There’s sex but compared to Politics‘ it’s less extravagant, though still chronicled by a theatrical narrator. The kind who addresses the reader as “dear reader” often enough to indicate a secret drinking game is at work.

The narrator reveals that he was born 60 years after Haffner, that he was a friend. As the book goes on, this information feels inadequate, as if a complete stranger had come for dinner, shared the great stories of your parents with you, then disappeared after dessert. The stories were good, now you need to know about the stranger.

The narrator invokes the aging libertine archetype, affectionately buttering his prose with the term Haffnerian, scrupulously reporting on old Haffner’s sexual triumphs, on his funny-sad-awesome mediocrity, in ways that a first person narrator could not. Or at least, could not without being written off as an asshole. And the narrator insists that Haffner is not entirely an asshole because he is many things. The chapter titles—Haffner Amphibious, Haffner Delinquent, Haffner Gastronomic, and so on—suggest the same.

Haffner is most lovable, least cartoonish, when his religious, overweight, hip-hop-loving grandson Benji turns up unannounced, half way through the novel, seeking romantic counsel from his grandfather. The two enjoy an epic Chinese dinner together and talk Jewishness, women, hip hop—Benji is crushing on the immigrant French hip hop of turn of the century Marseilles and desperately wants Haffner to understand why. To hear what he hears.

After dinner, the plot has to move forward. Will Haffner get back his dead ex-wife’s house? Which female contestant will win this man of great sexual appetite by tying him up and penetrating him with a lubricated candlestick? The narrator, that know-it-all, revealed in the first few pages that this adventure in the center of Europe was Haffner’s finale. One can’t help but wish that the two heroes would stay in the sanctuary of the Chinese restaurant and eventually, maybe, love each other instead of loving the versions of each other they used to love. Instead, though Benji asks him not to, Haffner goes to his potentially dangerous business meeting good and drunk, running Cole Porter lines like prayer.

Haffner is unfamiliar with the song that haunts his grandson, Mourir 1000 Fois. Benji thinks it’s about terror, the final countdown, the violence of some foreign gangster fantasy. Truth is, Oxmo Puccino, Parisian by way of Mali, certified bad ass, blessed with smarts, swagger, the meaty voice of a French Biggie, considers love. Considers the necessary, futile task of clinging to who and what one loves in the face of death. Love is gold, Ox says. And that’s why a man can die a thousand ways, a thousand times—so many Haffners, so many deaths.

Listen to the song from 1998, it thumps slowly, a little out of time, like an old heart. The opening lyrics translated:

I’m afraid of death, I know,
I’ve seen it spell my name, call my friends,
I never saw them again, I’m afraid that without me
life will go its course, some other cunt will get the cash.

Listen to Oxmo’s 2009 album here, and see Thirlwell read with Gary Shteyngart at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble on April 5th.

– Tejal Rao is a writer from Northwest London.

The Ask

Sam Lipsyte is the poet laureate of the American loser. If there was any question about this before, his new novel, The Ask, has settled the matter. Lipsyte is the kind of comic writer who has his finger on the pulse of the most pathetic possible way of living in America at any given time. The Ask does for the recession what The Subject Steve did for the malaise of the late ‘90s and Homeland did for aging loyal Reaganites in a post 9/11 world. It’s narrated by Milo Burke, who is a former development officer at a third-rate university only referred to as Mediocre University. Newly unemployed and unable to support his family, Milo is given one last chance at his old job: charming a potential donor—a major “ask” in development parlance—who happens to be his old college roommate. And if, in the process, Milo becomes an indentured servant tasked with covering up his old friend’s sordid past, then so be it.

Lipsyte has always excelled at a certain kind of first-person protagonist, the self-aware, self-righteous misanthrope who refuses to buy into the system. The kind of failure you can’t help but cheer for. In this sense, Milo Burke is cut from the same cloth as Teabag Miner, Homeland‘s protagonist. In fact, everything that is wonderful about Lipsyte is present in The Ask: the cripplingly hilarious dialogue and observations; the ability to find comedy in the most dismal of circumstances; the male friendships, equal parts homoerotic and homophobic; the sudden rhapsodies of beauty and despair sandwiched between assaults on the mundane and ponderous.

But in The Ask, Lipsyte’s view of America has evolved and become more complex than anything seen in his earlier novels. The rants are less myopic; resentment has turned into anger. For better or worse, Milo is aware of the systems of power that surround him. Lipsyte’s narratives have always ultimately been about class, the anxieties of a lower middle class peering in at the world of privilege that lies frustratingly beyond its reach, but this quality has never been clearer than it is in The Ask as Lipsyte focuses his considerable talent on the broken promise of a liberal arts education and the fallacy of social mobility.

The ultimate lesson of The Ask is that everything is bound to disappoint: your job, your marriage, your friends, your children, your parents, your dreams, your talent. And as the last few chapters of The Ask fail to coalesce, when the climax peters out and fails to delivers on the pay-off you’re expecting, you realize that Sam Lipsyte is bound to disappoint you as well.

But I like to think that Lipsyte meant it that way. Things don’t usually work out for the losers of the world. Satisfying conclusions are rare and hard-fought. It’s a difficult truth, but there’s no one I’d rather hear it from than Sam Lipsyte.

- Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25, 296 pp.)



Burial Ceremony (excerpted from “Unforgivable”)

Jérémie’s dog was smashed against the rocks by one of those enormous waves that had been rolling in all afternoon—there had been a change in the moon. The dog’s skeleton had been battered to bits and its head reduced to a pulp.

Two other dogs were found, some cats, and a few cattle washed down from the Adour River—as happens after every big storm—carrying with it drugs, wads of banknotes, cigarette cartons, etc. The town hall employed men to clean away these more or less inappropriate objects, some of them bloodstained, from the beach. Jérémie’s dog hadn’t a single tooth left, its tongue had been severed.

Dusk was falling. I knew he was searching for his dog. A few hours earlier, he had arrived, slightly concerned, to ask me if I had seen it—occasionally the dog went for a walk with the girls. I had tried to calm him, reminding him just how quick, intelligent, and alert the animal had shown itself to be—even to my eyes, someone who is not very interested in domestic pets—and therefore clever enough to take shelter if the weather was turning for the worse. His complexion was almost gray. Behind him, the sea was roaring, low clouds were streaming past like submarines in the bronze sky. “Keep me posted,” I’d said to him. “Use your phone. Have faith.”

A moment later, the storm had broken, and during the two hours that followed I completely forgot about him and his dog.

Roger had set off to do goodness knows what in town, and the two little girls, who claimed they had seen a flash of lightning pass through the house, were clinging to me and trembling like leaves, while the sky was lit up and deafening explosions shook the entire house.

They were tugging at my sweater. I had one of them on each knee. They were bending forward to yell into my ear when the heavens unleashed a flash of lightning right over the dunes. A sudden apparition, in the garden, just as the storm was moving away, was the cause of their latest cries: a sort of motionless specter on his milky-white, steaming shoulders from which huge drops trickled.

Jérémie was holding the remains of his dog in his arms.

“Listen, girls,” I said. “You must go up to your bedroom.”

But they had already jumped up, had opened the bay window, and were rushing over to Jérémie before I was able to step in. They were drenched from head to foot in a trice.

I ushered everyone into the kitchen. The girls were weeping noisily and were throwing tantrums. Jérémie appeared to be in a state of shock. I took the animal from him and went to lay it on top of the dryer. A stuffed doll, weighing ten kilos or so, scarcely recognizable, and unpleasant to touch.

I made everyone get out of the kitchen. The twins were clinging to me and sobbing, convinced that I could do something to bring this dog back to life. I dragged them over to the bar so that I could pour a dram of 70° whisky—o river of fire, o reviving force—for someone who seemed to be desperately in need of it.

“Let’s sit down,” I said. “Let’s try to control our breathing. OK, girls? Calm down. And you, Jérémie, drain that glass, please. I’m going to get you another. There’s no point in howling, you know. Where’s your father? I’d like to know where he is. You’re soaked. Go and find some towels. Jérémie and I will dry you. Won’t we, Jérémie? Won’t we, Jérémie? My poor old friend. What a wretched business, by the way. The poor dog. But come along, sit down, don’t just stand there like an idiot. Yes, do, don’t worry about that. It’s waterproof leather. Don’t bother about that. Try and relax. Breathe in. Breathe in deeply. So you found him like that, on the rocks? Beneath the lighthouse, you say? Do you think he fell from up there? That he bumped into a couple of irritable gays having it away in the bushes? Hmm. Maybe. It’s not impossible. I know they don’t like being disturbed. But I don’t imagine you’ve any proof of what you’re suggesting. These guys must have chucked your dog in the water? And why would they do that, Jérémie? Look at me. What’s the matter? Wait a second. Listen to me, girls. I’m not joking anymore.”

While they set off in the direction of the airing cupboard upstairs, I leaned over toward him:

“You went to bug them, is that it? Don’t tell me you did that, Jérémie. Look at me. Did you go to bug these guys? But what on earth got into your head? You see the result? Your father didn’t help you, as far as that’s concerned. I’m telling you frankly, he did you no favors.”

His head dropped so low that I could no longer see his face. I didn’t know whether water was dripping from him or whether he was crying. A smell of damp dog now pervaded the house. A small puddle was forming at his feet. One more appalling story. A story of total wastefulness—for which the dog paid the price.

“Listen to me. We can’t bury a dog in the forest in weather like this, absolutely not. That would be verging on madness, do you hear? Digging a grave in weather like this, you must be joking? Using the headlights, I suppose? In twenty inches of mud. In teeming rain.” They pointed out that the storm had died down. That the moon had dried the darkened fields as it rose.

I helped him carry the dog to the trunk of my car while the girls searched the house, gathering up all the flashlights they could find; I could hear the cutlery flying around in the drawers, the cupboard doors slamming.

As I went out, I had the feeling that I was diving into a pool of warm water. I left a message for Judith informing her of the predicament we had got into, were she to come home and find the house empty. If she ever did come home. Something I was never entirely sure about. “I don’t even know where you are,” I added in a tone of voice that struck me as plaintive.

As time went by, I was becoming increasingly sentimental. If I went on like this, I would soon become ridiculous.

Half an hour later, we pulled up in the middle of the forest. It was still raining quite hard. It was still dark. In the back, the little girls were still spluttering into their handkerchiefs. I turned round to them and made them promise not to move from there while Jérémie and I were working.

Very quickly, our task became a quagmire.

The earth was dark and thick. As we dug deeper, the hole filled with water. Through the misted-up windows of the car, the two girls were watching us open-eyed. The rain, all around us, was spitting like bacon in a frying pan. “I’m not going to go on asking you the same question until the end of time,” I said, almost yelling so that he should hear me. “Don’t count on it. So, one last time, I’m asking you, Jérémie, are you all right? . . . if not I’ll drive you to the emergency room right away to be looked after, OK? I recommend you find your tongue again quickly, OK?”

To begin with, he nodded. I told him that wouldn’t be enough.

“Yeah, it’s OK,” he muttered finally. “I don’t want to talk.”

These types of windbreakers with hoods that we had brought with us, very fashionable with campers and tourists, were sticking to our skins the way transparent film clings to vacuum-packed food.

“They murdered my dog!” he grunted between his teeth before beginning to dig frantically again.

I looked at him for a moment. “I can’t get over the fact that you could have done that,” I said to him eventually. “I’m flabbergasted. Your mother really will be pleased. I think she’ll be really proud of you. Doubly so. But for a start, you don’t know a thing. You accuse these people, but you don’t know a thing. You’ve no right to do that.”

He stood up and looked at me fiercely, but no word came from his lips. He suddenly hurled his shovel to the ground and set off furiously to collect his dog.

We had already talked about this, he knew what I thought and what my views were on the subject. Nevertheless, I had admitted that when it had to do with the father or the mother, it did not make things any easier for the child. I could understand his confusion. I could understand that things weren’t quite right inside this child’s head—and yet it wasn’t as if we were having to be protected from rabies or poliomyelitis or dyscalculia.

He stood still for a moment, in front of the open trunk of the car, while torrential rain beat down on his head, before bending down to pick up his dog. Once again, I was happy to admit that the loss was tough for a young fellow who had just come out after six years in prison. In any case, all this was not very good for my coachwork; I didn’t know whether Audi treated the inside of the trunk with antirust.

  • *          *

The following day, we were obliged to go back to put up a cross or risk dealing with a double nervous breakdown— Alice had brought them up very badly—and being labeled an infidel; Alice had managed to have them baptized and religion was already seeping into their young and hazy minds. Since when had people not been putting crosses on graves? What sort of a grandfather did they have after all?

The weather was fine after the previous night’s storms. The sky was a washed-out blue. Imagining that we might use the opportunity to find a few cèpe mushrooms, I agreed—on condition that they didn’t expect me to be involved with preparing the thing, for I wasn’t in the mood for that.

I was unsure whether to wake their father. I was having breakfast. I took a look at my post. Since I was still writing a few stories for newspapers and had become unusually obsessive about proof corrections—I was well known for being the worst in the whole country, the kind who really did split hairs—I was still fairly busy, and this meant I could not devote my time to their games, their ceremonies, their fussy demands, and I had therefore left them in the garage, asking them to be careful not to injure themselves with any sharp tool or other.

As for me, I could no more bring myself to put two bits of wood together—or anything else—as long as there was a chance that Alice was still alive.

Judith had returned in the middle of the night. For the time being, she was asleep.

What was the point of waking her up either? On reflection, talking to the twins was what probably suited me best on this dazzlingly bright day. A light breeze was coming from the sea, mingled with the scent of tamarisks. I found the girls and examined the cross they had made with bits of wood from a crate and bent nails. “Good work,” I said to them in a friendly way as I operated the garage door. “I know someone who’s going to be pleased.”

I wasn’t talking about Jérémie. However, it was he whom I spotted in my rearview mirror when I switched on the engine. I gave a frosty glance at the girls. Then I reversed and stopped alongside him.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” I said after contemplating him for a moment. “Go back home. Let us deal with this.”

It was as if he were clenching his teeth with all his might. In the end, I asked him to get in. “I was saying that for your own good,” I said as I drove off. From a canvas bag he carried on his shoulder, he took out a cross that had been astonishingly and elaborately carved and polished, and which gleamed like a fine, old wooden floor that had been newly polished.

The girls cried out in delight. He shrugged his shoulders. He explained that he had developed this pastime in prison. That this carefully decorated cross was the least he owed his friend, his companion.

It was so childish. On a level with the twins, who would soon be asking for holy water; yet the girls were still at an age to bury dead beetles . . . and he at an age to hold up a service station.

He must have spent the entire night there. It was so childish. I didn’t need to see the state his hands were in to imagine the ordeal he was going through, but I found it somewhat hard to sympathize, considering what I was going through myself.

In any case, he was sending out very negative vibes. I suspected that he was taking advantage of his mother’s absence in order not to eat anything. Before she left, A.-M. had filled the freezer with individual portions that could be put straight into the microwave, but this seemed to require an effort he could not manage. He was growing extremely pale.

He didn’t utter a word throughout the journey. I didn’t know whether I was right or wrong to go through this foolish procedure with them. And yet it was from me, I supposed, being the eldest in the group, that one might have expected a little good sense. To have put a stop right away to this jaunt, which did not show any of us in a good light.  However, I had not done this. I had not clapped my hands to bring the three of them down the earth. I had not put my foot down. I had opened the car door and asked Jérémie to get in.

I would have found it very difficult to say what it was I was giving in to, but the result was here, on this road that meandered through the brush and climbed up toward the hill, in an atmosphere that was as sultry as one could imagine.

The cross that Jérémie had carved and the skill and passion that he had obviously devoted to its construction made the process even more solemn, even more unbearable. Just what one needed to avoid. But it was too late to turn back now.

A little while later, Jérémie was looking at my CD player and scrolling through my lists. “Can I put on ‘Current 93’?” he asked as we were nearing our objective; a shower of golden petals that had fallen from the trees rustled on the road, still shimmering after the strong intermittent downpours during the night. I gave in. What did it matter? I could see the twins in the rearview mirror. I could see their hands joined, I could see their lips moving and I wondered whether they were reciting some sort of prayer.

We had buried the dog in the teeming rain but we were now dealing with the funeral ceremony on one of those infinitely graceful autumn days for which we were the envy of the entire world. The bay that stretched out behind us, from the Spanish coast to the horizon, was like a casket of jewels that sparkled with amethysts, sapphires, turquoises, etc. Ernesto often used to walk here. I mean to say that Ernest Hemingway often used to walk here. He always said that there was no better place in the world for a writer. He was hardly exaggerating. He used to come to these parts regularly, accompanied by one of my aunts, to pick cèpes and take a siesta beneath the ancient oak and chestnut trees. That stout fellow.

Jérémie had brought along a hammer and some nails the size of a finger to put up the two crosses. The tree trunk beneath which his dog was buried seemed as hard as stone. He had asked me to leave the doors open so that we could hear some of those dismal songs that David Tibet specialized in; meanwhile the grim hammer blows echoed through the forest and the twins squelched about in the mud searching for leaves and flowers as decorations. I stood back a little, chewing on nicotine gum, pretending not to notice the flight of the crows directly above the clearing where the scene was taking place. I was longing to wander about in the brush, for I could detect a very distinct smell of fresh mushrooms. Alice adored cèpes. Tears began to streak down my cheeks, just thinking about this. As I drove off along the wrong road, I could sense Jérémie’s silent approval.

- Philippe Djian is the author of more than twenty novels and best known in the US for 37.2° le matin, which was made into the film Betty Blue.

Excerpt from Unforgivable by Philipee Djian to be published in the English Language in the US by  Simon & Schuster on March 9th, 2010. Translated from the French by Euan Cameron. Originally published by Editions Gallimard in 2009

http://books.simonandschuster.com/Unforgivable/Philippe-Djian/9781439164419

Loss is a Many Splendored Thing

“Roisterous Calliope”: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

“I got an understanding of how terrible love can be.  You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself.  It’s crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it.  But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.”  – The narrator, a Viking, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”

Let’s say that there are two ways to read a work of fiction: to live a character’s experience as your own, or else, to view the character and his journey from the redoubt of your own identity, clear or unclear as it may be; that is, to fathom something deeper about the world, something that might otherwise be alien to your daily experience.  Dressing up on Halloween, we do the former; watching the news from our dens, the latter.  Call them the zombie versus the vampire attitudes toward a story: one always galumphing forward in pursuit of a live meal, the other, lurking in the confines of a shadowy castle, waiting for the arrival of fresh blood.

The characters, overwhelmingly male, who populate Wells Tower’s stories in the collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are zombie-like in their appetites, careening forward on a haphazard path, always open to contingency, never ending up quite where they—or we—expect.  Embodiments of a rollicking, if not often neat, zest for experience, most suggest personalities who read themselves into the shoes of the characters found in fiction, as they venture out beyond the safely delineated bounds of any prescribed identity.  And many, it happens, are individuals who have lost something dear.

Jacey, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of “Wild America,” has lost to divorce her father as a comforting presence in her life, and stands to lose much more in an encounter with a much older dude whom she finds ensconced on a flat rock in the middle of a stream.  She steps “with care across the algae-sueded rocks that [lead] out to the little island” where he is sunbathing.  A day that begins innocently enough as a date with an awkward classmate named Leander diverts to an impromptu walk through the forest near Jacey’s suburban Charlotte home at the behest of her pleasant-on-the-eyes cousin, Maya. (Maya earlier informs Jacey that she has tired of her relationship with a picture-perfect boy her own age and now plans to embark anew with an assistant director at the Governor’s School for the Performing Arts, where Maya is a student).

The kids share a joint—Maya’s, of course—while looking down the hill toward the stream, where the dude has just made himself at home in the sun with radio and beer.  When Maya begins to flaunt her allure by encouraging a flattered Leander to dance with her (she lowers him “in a competition-grade dip”), Jacey becomes enraged, calls Maya a slut, and storms down the hill toward her waiting corrupter.  The dude, Stewart Quick (at least that’s what he calls himself), has suffered a loss of his own: an arm, ripped off in an industrial washing machine and reattached only after his mother browbeat the doctors in the ER to salvage what they had deemed unsalvageable.  In her honor then, Quick’s damaged arm is covered in tattoos of his mother’s face.  Innocence and its perhaps inevitable endangerment is a recurring theme in Tower’s story collection.  This is an author who seems always ready to extend a little sympathy to the devil.

The language in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a delight, by turns uproariously comic and surprisingly deft, the dialogue mischievous, the trappings drawn mostly from what was once regarded the exclusive province of males (tensioners, pivot bolts, pulley grooves, scrollsaw work, Minwax sheets of bead-board wainscotting, carriage-welded class-four trailer hitches, moose-hunting, mountains in Maine).  A middle-aged son reflects on the cavortings of his increasingly senile father one afternoon in Washington Square Park: “A love of strangers, a fearlessness with them, had always been one of my father’s gifts.  A connoisseur of the chance encounter, he would have tried to speak the language of cockatoos if one touched down beside him.”  A boy, at odds with his domineering stepfather, reflects on the land surrounding his parents’ home after finding a flyer for an exotic lost pet: “With the leopard out there, the woods seem famous now.” A recent arrival in Florida admires his new acquaintance’s wife as she emerges from the sea: “She stopped and braceleted a dark thigh with her fingers, easing her hand down the length of her leg, stripping the water off in silver peels.”

A young runaway who finds work at a carnival (“You stand there and they pay you for it,” he thinks) finds his emotions stirred in favor of a girl who delights in the ride he must watch over:

She’s perpetually sucking the phosphorescent candy they sell at the fair.  Each time Jeff Park tugs her lap bar to be sure it’s locked down tight, he steals a glimpse of the pale green light glimmering behind her teeth, a light of both desolation and comfort, the light of a lone cottage window on an empty street.  He thinks it’s there for him.

Tower’s stories offer a vision of an America exuberant and all-embracing, if, maybe for that very reason, destined to folly, and sometimes something darker.  Folly which—dark or no—can prove its own end, and not an entirely unpleasurable one at that.

“Industry Is The Enemy of Melancholy”: Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley

“I rather like breathing.  Still, I wonder if our obsession with longevity is entirely… healthy. ‘Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death,’ wrote William Hazlitt, ‘is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.  There was a time when we were not; this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?’” – Christopher Buckley

And in that epigraph, perhaps, we have an explanation for conservative resistance to health care reform.  But, no, that is not a fair judgment of the work of a writer who famously threw his hat in the ring for Barack Obama—at the cost of his slot on the masthead of the publication his father founded (The National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr.).  And especially unfair in opening a review of an elegantly concise and revealing account of losing two parents in less than a year.  If it isn’t Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis then it is not wholly alien in breadth and scope: where Mr. Eggers’ book documents youthful flight from tragic circumstance, Christopher Buckley provides a seasoned and unflinching confrontation with the inevitable, where what is offered is nothing less than a literary representation of the last days of modern conservatism’s “founder and primum mobile,” a great writer of our time—say what you will about his politics, it’s hard to deny William F. Buckley, Jr. that.

“I’m not sure how this book will turn out,” runs the introduction to Losing Mum and Pup,  “I mostly write novels, and I’ve found, having written half a dozen, that if you’re lucky, the ending turns out a surprise and you wind up with something you hadn’t anticipated in the outline.”  While noting that he is at heart a satirist, Buckley begins his treatment of a most personal (and many might think unfunny) subject by dwelling on the theme of orphanhood, a major artery in the thoroughfare of American Literature.  Curious, as Buckley suggests, to be over fifty and still identify so strongly with a figure like Huckleberry Finn; no wonder that as bodies age most people do not find it easy to let go their attachment to figments of youth, an attachment that can well seem to signify life itself.

For it is only the great, the great will have you know, who can look back on a life lived and measure it in terms of their abiding works—and his father was such a great, Buckley avers in modest fashion, while not hesitating to depict the man in his failing hours (“Pup’s daily intake of pills would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause”).  “Once they’re both gone, your parents’ house instantly turns into a museum,” he writes,  “Every trace of them you see, you imagine inside a glass display case, along with a plaque or caption.  This red pen was used by William F. Buckley Jr.  These sunglasses belonged to William F. Buckley Jr.”

Not solely a meditation on death, the manner in which flesh finally turns cold and immutable—so that viewing the body in its coffin Buckley is careful to touch only his father’s hair, which retains its living semblance—the memoir paints an adoring, if sometimes challenging, son’s portrait of his parents in life, a vision more powerful for the fact of their having departed this “vale of tears” (a favorite expression of WFB’s).

Buckley credits his mother’s ferocious wit as a chief spur to his own literary endeavors (“Her fluent mendacity, combined with adamantine confidence, made her truly indomitable… whatever talent I possess as a ‘humorist’—dreadful word—I owe to her”), and records his father’s various tried and true expressions with brief entries as to their meaning (I wouldn’t worry about it: “WFB speak for ‘The conversation is over’”).  In so far as he is willing to deny subscription to his father’s form of Catholicism (a belief which, likewise, Patricia Aldyen Austin Buckley, did not share), Buckley also renders a portrait of the man in his finest hours.

When the call from his wife came in early 2007 that his mother’s death was imminent, Buckley found himself in the state of Virginia at Washington and Lee University for a speaking engagement in his own honor (the novelist appreciates the praise of admirers since those closer to home were not always so generous; about his then most recent novel Boomsday, his father only emailed, “This one didn’t work for me.  Sorry.  xxB”).  Of his car ride through stormy weather back to Stamford, Connecticut, Buckley observes, true to English major form: “Rain on the way to mother’s deathbed: Right, I thought, the objective correlative: the outward aspect mirroring the inner aspect.”

Mrs. Buckley’s memorial service, which her son was entrusted to arrange, was held in the Temple of Dendur at the MET, where Mrs. Buckley was a leading patron.  Each program featured the eulogy written by his father, one that WFB “couldn’t bring himself to deliver a cappella in the shadow of the old Egyptian goddess.” The eulogy read, in part, “I offered to paint her fingernails, and she immediately extended her hand, using the other one on the telephone.” At the event, son depicts father thusly: “Poor Pup, poor desolate man—his face was flushed, livid, scarlet with grief.”

When, not very long after, his father’s time arrived (Buckley having spent months away from his own family to help attend to him), reactions varied.  W. called to say, “He was quite a guy.”  Gore Vidal, with whom the elder Buckley held a bitter public feud in decades past, labeled the deceased in print, with twisted passion, “a hysterical queen” and “a world-class American liar,” not failing to add “RIP WFB—in hell.” Far more numerous, though, were the plaudits.

Over the course of his final years, WFB took delight in Google Alerts of his name, often asking that his son read to him from each.  Once news of the great man’s death at his desk, surrounded by “an eagle’s nest of printed matter—newspapers, magazines, books—CDs, tissue boxes, and sundry detritus,” escaped into the world, Christopher Buckley could not help but marvel: “Boy, how he’d have loved this, the mother of all WFB Google news alerts.”

Near the end of his memoir, Buckley writes:

How did it turn out, Pup?  Were you right after all?  Is there a heaven?  Is Mum there with you?  (Grumbling, almost certainly, about the “inedible food.”) And if there is a heaven and you are in it, are you thinking, Poor Christo—he’s not going to make it. And is Mum saying, Bill, you have got to speak to that absurd creature at the Gates and tell him he’s got to admit Christopher.  It’s too ridiculous for words.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor